Goa lessons for BJP

If the party doesn't want to slip any further, it might want to take a page out of the state's former chief minister Manohar Parrikar's book

Assembly elections are not due in Goa till 2027. But the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), currently in power there, should maybe begin worrying.

Goa has two parliamentary seats — South Goa and North Goa. The general elections yielded a shock defeat for the BJP in the South Goa constituency, where it thought it had played a master stroke by fielding Pallavi Dempo as its candidate, expecting that as a new face, she would unseat the Congress from its bastion once more.
 

The Congress has held the seat 10 times while the BJP has won it twice (1999 and 2014). Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a campaign meeting for her at Sancoale. She was the first woman to be fielded from a parliamentary constituency in the state, with a name that evokes instant recall among Goans. Ms Dempo belongs to a family that has interests in mining, shipbuilding, sports, and real estate. In her affidavit, she declared assets amounting to Rs 255.44 crore. Her husband, Shrinivas Dempo, declared assets of Rs 998.83 crore. Most of the wealth shown in the affidavit was from shareholdings in 81 companies and bonds purchased in some of the top brands and banks. The family owns homes in Dubai and London, luxury cars, jewellery, and other investments, the affidavit tells us.
 

By contrast, the Congress fielded Capt Viriato Fernandes, retired from the Indian Navy after 26 years of service with a clutch of commendations and recognition for a bit role he played in the Kargil war in 1999, when the Navy launched Op Talwar to blockade Pakistani ports to prevent reinforcements. In his campaign he spoke about the travails of the little guy and religious discrimination — and won the election by a 13,000-vote margin.
 

The BJP retained North Goa by a margin of more than 100,000 votes.
 

South Goa is interesting because it has pockets of a big Christian population: Salcete, for instance, is around 40 per cent Christian. It was to this that the BJP leaders in the state, including Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and BJP state chief Sadanand Tanavade, attributed the party’s defeat: Outreach by the head of Goa’s Catholic Church, Cardinal Felipe Neri Ferrao, who told his flock to vote for those who would uphold values “enshrined in the Constitution”.
 

The truth, however, is slightly more complicated.
 

In 2022, eight out of 11 Congress MLAs who had won the Assembly elections joined the BJP, catapulting the BJP to 33 out of 40 MLAs. Of the eight, three big names were elected from Assembly constituencies in South Goa. For instance, Digambar Kamat and Aleixo Sequeira represent constituencies in Salcete. A statistical check tells us the BJP did really badly in these Assembly segments. Mr Kamat was chief minister in his day. Margao is considered his bastion. Here Ms Dempo was just around 1,000 votes ahead of Mr Fernandes.

By contrast, Mr Fernandes got a 60,000-plus vote surplus over Ms Dempo in the eight Assembly segments in the Salcete taluka, which became an unbeatable lead.
 

How much the Church influenced the voters and how much the voters were put off by defectors, opting to punish them by voting against the BJP, is hard to tell. But this much is clear: Although the BJP won the North Goa seat by a big margin, here too, in the constituencies held by defectors, the BJP did not do well.
 

So, the one lesson the BJP can learn is that you can be penny-wise and pound-foolish. You can induce defection and form a “stable” government in the state. But then, in the Lok Sabha, the people can do to you what they did in the South Goa seat: Hand over victory snatched from the jaws of defeat to the opponent.
 

It was former chief minister the late Manohar Parrikar who scripted the BJP’s victory in South Goa in 2014: Mainly by accepting the denominational reality. This BJP outreach was first tried in the 2012 Assembly elections, when Parrikar stitched an alliance with the Catholic Church based on a pro-development agenda. For instance, at the time, the government approved state aid to approximately 127 Church-run English-medium schools. This was in defiance of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). A rebel RSS leader who did not agree with this thinking later quit the RSS-BJP and contested the elections but lost badly.
 

If it doesn’t want to slip any further, the BJP might want to take a page out of Parrikar’s book instead of fulminating about “dharmagurus” and their role in politics. Manufactured majorities like in the Goa Assembly can result in a political backlash as well.